Common Descent

The crew of the Destiny come across a group of humans descended from well the crew of the Destiny in the episode Common Descent. The air scrubbers that were retrofitted when the Icarus group first boarded the ship are failing and the search begins for more lime or similar material to help clean the air. They gate to a planet and meet two English speaking young people who recognise both Scott and Greer and reveal that they are the latest generation from the crew of Destiny who found themselves stranded 2000 years in the past after attempting the nice chevron dialing within the star as told in Twin Destinies.

The news of these spreads quickly with Eli, Chloe and Camille venturing to the planet where they greet one of the settlements elders named “Yaozu” who recites a verse very familiar to Camille and in its native language. The crew then learn about the lives of those who fled the Destiny never to return thanks to the extensive use of Kinos and the ability to maintain the integrity of the day to day records of their society. No doubt Eli with his long held belief that everything should be documented would aid this young society in the centuries to come allowing for more rapid development and no corruption of historical figures and events. This settlement has lost contact with their homeworld “Novus” which was experiencing geologic issues which they were beginning to believe were being caused by a small black hole passing by the solar system, with no gate access to resources the settlement is dying but Young refuses to take them back to Novus as Destiny itself even with limited repairs would be unable to handle the extra personnel, the the drones attack.

The Destiny is battling the drones and taking people off the planet as it too comes under fire but when the Stargate is damaged the Destiny jumps into hyperspace and abandons a number of her own crew along with the last of the Novus citizens. Eli manages to get a message to the Destiny using the gate control subsystems and the Destiny swings back and transports the people to Novus. Unfortunately the planet is wrapped in extensive cloud cover with low temperatures and particulates in the atmosphere. The cities are intact though but no life is found and it is believed a major volcanic eruption drove the planet into nuclear winter and decimated the population of Novus.

Common Descent is a very entertaining episode which really makes the most of Twin Destinies at a time when there was no indication those eighty or so people who were lost in a wormhole would ever be heard of again. The producers and writers however have created a master stroke in exploiting a time travel narrative in a less than usual way with very positive results and far more to come in the second part of this story Epilogue.

Our thanks to Miles for joining us this week, he’ll return for Epilogue and continued thanks to Brad for the feedback for The Hunt. This weeks promo is for Flash Pulp and next week we are as mentioned going to be watching Epilogue, we hope you can join us for that.